Women of Note

Carolyn Cheverine

Senior vice president and chief counsel,
industrial sector

Rachel Abbey McCafferty

Carolyn Cheverine enjoys working as an in-house attorney because she likes to feel like she’s “helping the business.” If the company is looking to finish a contract with a client, she likes rolling up her sleeves and getting to work.

“I have no qualms about working with them and staying and getting it done, because it’s sort of a win-win for everybody,” she said. “I think one of the reasons I went into transactional law versus litigation is, to me, in litigation, there’s no winners.”

She continued, “Because even if you win the lawsuit, you still have to pay the legal bills, and usually, you’re not happy because of that. Whereas in (the) transactional world, usually both parties, someone wants to sell something and someone wants to buy something, and usually, you can walk away pretty happy. You might not be ecstatic, but it’s more of a win-win. So, I’m a glass-half-full person.”

Cheverine earned her bachelor’s degree at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and her law degree at University of Virginia’s School of Law. She started her career at a firm in Seattle, but moved to the Cleveland area in 1994 to be near the hometown of her husband, Vince. She agreed, as long as she could get an in-house position, which she found with KeyCorp.

For raising a family, Cleveland is great, Cheverine said. It’s a “small big town,” and she’s been fortunate to find a series of good jobs. After KeyCorp., she went on to work for a number of local industrial companies (Noveon Inc., Lubrizol Corp. and Cliffs Natural Resources Inc.), before joining Eaton in 2014. The manufacturer is based in Dublin but has substantial operations in Beachwood.

One thing that’s always been important to Cheverine — and something she’s advocated for at Eaton — is diversity and inclusion. She saw that there were only a few women in her business and accounting classes in college (she even joined a sorority, Kappa Delta, as a way to make more female friends), and saw a similar pattern again as a young attorney. And as the mother of two daughters, Caitlin and Beth, she said she doesn’t want to see her daughters go through the struggles her generation did.

Eaton formally launched a women’s employee resource group the month Cheverine started, and she immediately reached out to get involved, as she had been involved in similar groups at other companies. She quickly ended up chairing the brand management committee. That work recently led to Eaton’s perfect score on the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index, which assesses LGBT inclusion in the corporate world.

“Women look at best-of lists,” Cheverine said. “It doesn’t matter that it’s not, you know, working mothers magazine. Women, I think more than men, want to see whether it’s an inclusive environment.”

And inclusion should be important to companies as the gender split in the workforce draws closer to 50-50, Cheverine said. Customers and clients are going to increasingly be women, and it’s helpful to gain an understanding of how the genders may speak or understand things differently, she said. And diversity of all kinds can help a company improve its business, “because people look at things in different ways,” she said.

Richard Goldfarb is a partner at Stoel Rives LLP in Seattle, where Cheverine started her legal career. Cheverine is someone with the ability to walk into a room and get to know people almost immediately, he said. She sticks to her morals and has a “spark to her,” he said.

“She’s someone I have the highest regard for,” Goldfarb said.

If she wasn’t working full-time, Cheverine said her husband jokes she’d be a “professional volunteer.” Currently, she’s involved in an organization focusing on a cure for Alzheimer’s, as well as Cleveland Play House. Outside of that, she stays active, particularly by playing tennis.

Cheverine said she would like to be a general counsel someday, but it’s not the “end-all, be-all” of her career. She said she’s had the opportunity before, but she’d rather be at a company about which she feels passionate.

“For me, it’s like, I want to make a difference,” she said. “I mean, that’s the bottom line.”

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